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Eliminate altruism to give NS a free hand?

A Darwinian Just-So story.
The absurdity of Darwinian accounts here can be seen from the ambiguity: if natural selection produces altruism, then why not eliminate altruism, so that natural selection can operate with interference to produce—? altruism.

Note how incoherence enters into the explanation. Check out the Oedipus effect at the history-and-evolution website.

Evolution and Altruism

The War of All Against All

By Chuck Colson
Christian Post Guest Columnist
Thu, Nov. 30 2006 10:39 AM ET[-] Text [+] E-Mail Print RSS Subscribe to Newsletter More on Topic In the new novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, an unnamed catastrophe has wiped out most of humanity. What remains is a colorless, lifeless shell where â€œlong lines of charred and rusting cars,â€ filled with incinerated corpses, sit â€œin a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber.â€
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The survivors find themselves living in what Thomas Hobbes called â€œthe war of all against allâ€: scrounging for food while avoiding their fellow men, many of whom have turned to cannibalism.

Among the survivors are the unnamed protagonists of the novel: a man and his 10-year-old son who was born after the catastrophe. As the father tells his son, â€œI was appointed by God to [take care of you]. I will kill anyone who touches you.â€ At the same time, he wants to preserve his sonâ€™s goodness, which is next-to-impossible in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. In the novelâ€™s world, the boyâ€™s survival depends on his father eradicating his altruistic impulses. The man must teach his son that being willing to â€œgive that little boy half of my foodâ€ is a bad idea.

McCarthyâ€™s protagonist isnâ€™t the only one who has trouble reconciling our survival instinct with our capacity for altruism. As the philosopher David Stove pointed out, altruismâ€”the willingness, that is, to sacrifice for othersâ€”is obviously disadvantageous in what Darwin called â€œthe struggle for life.â€ In a world where the goal is to pass on your selfish gene, helping someone else pass on theirs makes no sense.

While Darwin himself never acknowledged the difficulty posed by altruism, his acolytes and disciples did. Their responses led to the creation of the discipline known variously as â€œevolutionary psychologyâ€ or â€œsociobiology.â€

Whatever itâ€™s called, the evolutionary â€œexplanationâ€ for altruism is basically the same: Itâ€™s really selfishness in disguise. When the son offers to give away half of his food, itâ€™s not goodnessâ€”itâ€™s a kind of enlightened self-interest. We do what we perceive as â€œgoodâ€ for others so that they, in turn, might do the same for us and, thus, increase both of our chances for survival.

Of course, the transaction being described isnâ€™t â€œaltruismâ€ at all; itâ€™s called â€œcooperation.â€ Itâ€™s the stuff of zebras and baboons, both of which live in large groups for mutual protection and neither of which would knowingly sacrifice its life to save anotherâ€™s.

But in the Darwinian scheme, true altruism â€œhas no place in nature.â€ When you start from the assumption that our behavior is the product of â€œselfish genes,â€ then you must agree with the sociobiologist who wrote â€œscratch an â€˜altruistâ€™ and watch a hypocrite bleed.â€

Little wonder that Stove called Darwinism, especially sociobiology, a â€œridiculous slander on human beings.â€ Darwinism not only cannot account for what is most essentially humanâ€”that is, things like altruism and musicâ€”it insists on denigrating them, as well.

In contrast, Christians understand that while we are born with the capacity for selfishness and even cruelty, we are also capable of caring for others. Because we are created in the image of God, we not only donâ€™t have to be at war with our neighbors, we can willingly die for them, as well.